“Fine,” I said.
“Helps tamp down the grease,” he said, though in fact he had surprised me by being an adequate cook. Pot roast, reasonably well made, may not be notably elegant, but it was not what I had expected from a two hundred and seventy-five pound man in a wrinkled police uniform. Burned venison steaks were more like it, I had thought: virile, but badly executed.
One reason for the invitation had been immediately clear: Polar Bears was a lonely man, and he kept up a tide of chatter all during the meal. Not a word about my supposed suicide attempt, nor about the girls’ deaths — he had talked about fishing. Tackle and equipment, bait, seawater vs. freshwater fishing, fishing then vs. fishing now, boats and “People on Lake Michigan claim those coho salmon taste pretty good, but give me a river trout any day,” and “Course there’s nothing like dry fly fishing for sport, but sometimes I like to take my old spinning rod and just sit by the shallows and wait for that wily old grandad down there.” It was the talk of a man deprived by circumstances or profession of normal social conversation and who misses it badly, and I had chewed my way through several slices of juicy beef and a mound of vegetables in thick sauce while he let the tap flow and the pressure decrease.
I heard him tip a stack of plates into the sink and run water over them; a moment later he came back into the living room carrying a bottle of Wild Turkey under his arm, a porcelain bowl of ice cubes in one hand, and two glasses in the other.
“Something just occurred to me,” I said as he grunted, bending down over the table, and set down glasses, ice, and then the bottle with a deliberate thump.
“What’s that?”
“That we’re all men alone — single men. The four of us that used to know each other. Duane, Paul Kant, you and me. You were married once, weren’t you?” The furnishings and the brown walls made it obvious, even the ducks mounting up one of the side walls; Polar Bears’ house existed, it occurred to me, in symmetry with Paul’s, except that Polar Bears’ bore the traces of a younger woman’s taste, a wife, not a mother.
“I was,” he said, and poured bourbon over ice and leaned back on the couch and put his feet on the coffee table. “Like you. She ran off a long time ago. Left me with a kid. Our son.”
“I didn’t know you had a son, Polar Bears.”
“Oh, yeah. Raised him myself. He lives here in Arden.”
“How old is he?”
“Round about twenty. His mother left when he was just a little runt. She was no good. My boy never had much education, but he’s smart and he works around town on a kind of handyman basis. Got his own place too. I’d like him to join the police, but he’s got his own ideas. Good kid, though. He believes in the law, not like some of them now.”
“Why didn’t you or Duane remarry?” I helped myself to a good dose of bourbon.
“You could say I learned my lesson. Police work is hard on a wife. You never really stop worrying, if you see what I mean. And then, I never found another woman I could trust. As for good old Du-ane, I don’t think he ever really did like women. He’s got his girl to cook and keep house, and I reckon that’s about all he wants.”
I recognized that Polar Bears was making me feel very relaxed, giving me the spurious sense that this was nothing more than a casual evening between two old friends, and I looked at him from, my chair. Light silvered the thick flesh on the top of his head. His eyes were half closed.
“I think you’re right. I think he hates women. Maybe he’s your killer.”
Polar Bears gave a genuine laugh. “Ah, Miles, Miles. Well, he didn’t always hate women. There was one that got to him, once upon a time.”
“That Polish girl.”
“Not quite. Why do you think his daughter’s got that name of hers?”
I gaped at him, and found that his slitted eyes were watching me anything but sleepily.
“Truth,” he said. “I think he even lost his cherry to that little Alison Greening. You weren’t around every summer she was, you know. He was stuck on her, and I mean stuck. Course she mighta gone to bed with him, or done it standing up beside a haystack more likely, but she was too young for that to be public, and she treated him like shit most of the time anyhow. She just tore him up. I always thought that’s why he went and engaged himself to that Polish girl.”
The shock was still ringing in my chest. “You said he lost his virginity to Alison?”
“Yep. He told me himself.”
“But she could have been no older than thirteen.”
“That’s right. He said she knew a lot more about it than he did.”
I remembered the art teacher. “I don’t believe it. He was lying. She used to laugh at him.”
“That’s true too. He was real burned up by the way she preferred you to him whenever you were around. Jealous. Crazy jealous.” He bent forward over his belly and poured more bourbon into his glass, not bothering to add ice cubes. “So you can see why you shouldn’t go tossing that name around. Duane might think you was deliberately rubbing salt in his wounds. Not to mention that you oughta think about protecting yourself. I hate to act like a spiritual adviser, Miles, but I think you might even try goin’ to that church in the valley. People might let up on you if they see you acting more like them. Sit and absorb a little of Bertilsson’s wisdom. Funny how all these Norskies took to that little Swedish rat. I can’t see him for horse piss, but the farmers all love him. He gave me some story about your stealing out of Zumgo’s. A book, he said.”
“Ridiculous.”
“So I told him. What’s your side of this suicide business, anyhow, Miles? I don’t suppose there’s any truth in it.”
“None. Either it was an accident, or someone was trying to kill me. Or warn me off.” I was still mentally struggling to sit up.
“Warn you off what? You ain’t on anything. I’m glad it didn’t have anything to do with our talk yesterday.”
“Polar Bears,” I said, “did your father ever find out who called him, that night my cousin drowned?”
He shook his head, unhappy with me. “Get all that out of your head, Miles. Get it out of your system. We’re talking about now, not twenty years ago.”
“Well, did he?”
“Goddam it, Miles.” He poured what was left of his drink down his throat and bent forward, grunting, to make another. “Didn’t I tell you to leave that alone? No. He never did. That good enough for you? So you say this gas business was an accident. Right?”
I nodded, wondering what this conversation was really about. I had to talk to Duane.
“Well now, you see that’s what I thought. I wish we could have kept Tuta Sunderson out of it, because she’s bound to go around telling people what she thinks, and her version is a little hard on you. And right now, we’ve gotta take attention off of you. Aren’t you gonna have any more of this good booze?”